Sunday, December 30, 2007

When Jack Straw is one of the few too class actors Labour has left. He's also taken over the John Reid role as the minster of last resort for a desperate government. This is the context that his pronouncements today have to be seen in.

Labour is unpopular - really unpopular. How do they deal with this ? Not in the open and honest way that say Margaret Thatcher would have approached the problem by restating why what they are doing is necessary, but with the slippery sub-concious technique of New Labour spin.

Step 2 - admit nothing or as little as possible. "The only problem is that we haven't quite delivered yet" and the underlying problem is with people not perceiving how wonderful the New Labour government has been.

Step 3 - make some vague promise about the future as a gentle reminder that your actually in government, unlike the other lot.

This lack of courage perhaps comes form a lack of conviction, or perhaps from the absence of it. They have a magician's set of spin tricks that worked so well for them when the campaigned as an opposition ( for about the first 7 years in government ), but they are incompetent in the business of government.

Remember if Jack Straw shakes your hand you should count your fingers when you get it back and when Jack Straw appears to suggest the Conservatives have been doing a better job than Labour its time to look carefully at what he's up to.

No democracy for England

About Me

The pound in your pocket

"We used to think that you could spend your way out of a recession and increase employment by cutting taxes and boosting government spending. I tell you in all candour that that option no longer exists." James Callaghan

“The trouble with theoretical economists is that they don't understand that when you have a deficit, you can only finance it by borrowing, and you've got to persuade people that it's worth lending money to you and that they'll get their money back... there's no way of escaping it.” Dennis Healey during the 1976 Stirling Crisis.

"Lenin is said to have declared that the best way to destroy the Capitalist System was to debauch the currency. By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens ... Lenin was certainly right. There is no subtler, no surer means of over-turning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose."
John Maynard Keynes, 1920.

"To preserve [the people's] independence, we must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt. We must make our selection between economy and liberty, or profusion and servitude."
Thomas Jefferson, President of the United States of America,1801-1809.